Posting this with the permission of @deament as it was asked recently in the testers.chat slack and I’m interested to see the replies
How do people manage BAT (Business Acceptance Testing) here? I’ve been asked to come up with a process that we can use for future features that we release. This is my current idea.
Development team alongside stakeholders come up with suggested high-level scenarios for BAT testers to cover (e.g. Create a store event, cancel a store event, search for store events at XX branch).
Agree upon these scenarios and prioritise them. Some scenarios may be more important than others
Once the feature is ready for Business Acceptance Testing, reach out to the BAT tester(s)
Check to see what information they currently have of the feature, is an overview of the feature needed?
Share suggested scenarios for them to follow along with a list of questions to elicit feedback
Questions:
Ask if there are any other scenarios you think should be covered or will be used once it goes live?
Is there anything that concerns them?
Are they happy for the feature to go live?
Provide them with a clear channel on how to communicate this feedback (specific person)
Provide them with information we need from them if they find bugs
Suggested:
What they did
What did you expect to happen?
What actually happened?
URL
** User credentials
Screenshot
For some extra context:
The company is in multiple countries and they want business users from those countries to try out the features and see what they think. But it’s only typically 1 person in each country doing the BAT.
Over to you
Is testing software in this way something you have experience with? What process have you used in the past or are you currently using? What advice can you give to manage this business acceptance testing?
In my experience, depending on the business process and who the client is, the BAT may indeed be the client you are working with. No matter the project, the business has always been involved in determining the priority of the acceptance tests and reviewed the tests for accuracy of the test scenarios and outcomes based on the business rules.
If the acceptance testing is not being done by the business users I am working with, they have provided business users who are Subject Matter Experts in one or more areas of the application. This ensures that the people using the product are the people who say that we have created the right thing.
Looks like you have it totally covered just a couple of things having worked with a few BATs SME & UAT resources in the past.
Environment would you allow them to use your test environment or set aside the Demo one for their use. Users push weird buttons sometimes which can affect your environment, which is ok but can put your testing back sometimes.
Who would be there to help each BAT to on-board with it being multiple countries and would it be via a platform like zoom/discord etc. That sometimes adds another degree of separation with communication which may require more than a single initial walk-through.
If the BAT’s your working with are very experienced in testing you might not need to worry about any of this.
@heather_reid When you mentioned in point 1. ‘Developmnent team’ are you refering to the tester within that team as in my experience it is the tester who has the right level of understanding (functional + where significant complexity lies) to provide suggetions for the high-level scenarios.
Another pointer that is time-consuming but helps keep momentum, especially in decentralised organisatons is to have regular calls to follow progress. At the start of the test phase, it can be useful to organise a kickoff to present all relevent information to the session, such as the information mentioned in 7 and 8. All of this does depend on the group of users in question, however it is often safer to assume they know less than you think…
The “development team” has a tester, but then another business person from the local market performs the BAT.
So far, we’ve been having fairly regular calls with the local markets to update them with progress and give demos so they get to see the feature as it developers (and suggest changes)
Environment: PROD. Test environments on my project are very limited. And that’s how they had been doing things when I sstarted in this team, I was just trying to find a way to get that feedback from BAT people more clearly
Our business analyst is the main liaison. The people performing BAT aren’t exactly experienced in testing - they are people working for our local branch for the market of that feature (features on my projects are released for limtied markets at a time)
